Frank Borzage | Lazybones | A Farewell to Arms | Man's Castle | No Greater Glory | Big City | Mannequin | Three Comrades | Flight Command | Stage Door Canteen
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Frank Borzage directed many Hollywood films.
Some common subjects in the films of Frank Borzage:
Little known fact: Borzage and Raoul Walsh were friends when they worked at Fox in the early 30's. Source: interview with Raoul Walsh, 1972.
AMC used to show reruns of the old This Is Your Life TV program from the 1950's. One starred actor Jean Hersholt. The show listed all of Hersholt's charitable and service activities: they were astonishing! No wonder there is a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian award each year at the Oscars. Towards the end of the show, the host said, here is your old friend Frank Borzage! Out came the middle-aged Borzage, who said a few pleasant words to Hersholt. It is just a glimpse, but there is surviving footage of Borzage.
While there is a censor-placating marriage ceremony for Ruth (Zazu Pitts in a great performance), this is a thinly disguised look at the problems faced by unwed mothers and illegitimate children. It recalls Way Down East (D. W. Griffith, 1920). The negative look at small town life, and the wasted lives full of pain of rejected people who live there, also recall True Heart Susie (D. W. Griffith, 1919).
The hero and his girlfriend are not just a private couple. They also have to deal with all public views of the hero and the baby he is raising.
At the end, the hero gets back in touch with reality, painful as it is, when he wades into the river.
The dam is a geometric environment, like the lumber yard in No Greater Glory. Both are rectilinear. Both have regularly repeating elements: the sluices in the dam, the boards in the lumber yard.
The pavilion on the river at the end, is another Borzage building with clear walls.
The hero's car links him to high technology and progress in the opening scenes. By contrast, his well-dressed, well-to-do rival drives a lavish horse-and-buggy. This suggests that respectability and social prominence are linked to backward, anti-progress forces.
Kit and her boyfriend eventually open a garage, while the hero is away at war. Such garages, run by the heroes of later Borzage films, are a principal locale of Borzage's cinema: Big City, Three Comrades. They too are signs of technological modernity.
To be fair, the banker is not the enforcer of this code: Ruth's mother is. The banker is unlikable, but he is never a villain. As far as I can tell, the banker never learns about the child. However, there are also suggestions he does not try hard to find out.
During the World War I sequence, a German soldier hails the American hero as "Kamerad". One suspects a reference to left-wing politics. Once again, the hero fails to follow up on any left-wing political ideas. He wastes his contact with the outside world.
The hero is one of many Borzage men who wind up in uniform.
The comdey of the hero getting dressed up in his store clothes for the big party, gets repeated with variations in Three Comrades. In both films, the hero struggles with ill fitting clothes.
The nursing unit is one of several institutions in Borzage, that control people's romantic lives and marriages. People do not have private lives: their lives are negotiated through the institution.
Aviation plays a role in many Borzage films. Here we see airplanes bombing civilians: a sinister sight.
There are also connections between their heroes:
As in Stranded, we have a pair of professionals in love: in A Farewell to Arms an ambulance driver and a nurse. In both films, both characters' work is treated with respect.
The sidewalk-arcade long take starts out at the restaurant, then makes a right turn as the hero and heroine leave. Then it follows them in front, as they walk down the arcade.
The nurses are rolling cylindrical bandages, when they are listening in the opening scene. There is also a sort of transom, with an arched top.
The hero and heroine have their first love scene, near a circular fountain. It anticipates the shallow pools in the greenhouse in No Greater Glory.
At least twice, spiral metal work is seen on buildings in the street.
The container with the hero's cheese is circular, inside a square.
The ceiling seen in the Point-Of-View camera movement, is richly curved. So are the walls of the room, in the subsequent POV shots.
When the hero and heroine walk on the street, they pass through an arcade. It has a series of circular arches they pass under. The restaurant where they sit at the start, has a protruding circular sign, that juts out into the arcade. The arcade is a geometric environment.
The opening of Man's Castle recalls Lazybones. While the hero is not actually asleep, he is shown in a condition of idleness, feeding pigeons in the park. He soon meets a heroine as desperate as the Zazu Pitts character in Lazybones. The hero helps the heroine instinctively, just like the hero of Lazybones.
We switch to a restaurant scene, anticipating Three Comrades. There is a circular ice cream desert, piled high, like the circular platters of chops in the wedding banquet in Three Comrades.
The hero makes a public speech about politics in the restaurant. This anticipates the political speaker on the streets of Germany in Three Comrades.
The baseball team coach is a kid who acts like a grown-up. This anticipates the more elaborate metaphor about kids and war in No Greater Glory. This is a very funny scene, a high light of the rich humor that runs through Man's Castle.
The minister performs an unofficial wedding, recalling the similar wedding in A Farewell to Arms. In both films, this is a religious service, that ties the characters together in the sight of God, but which has no legal status. In both films, the characters are already sleeping together, before the ceremony.
The factory is fully wired with burglar alarms, that communicate with the police. Borzage films often recognize the existence of high technology of their time.
The overhead panel that opens up to the sky, is one of Borzage's movable architecture components. It recalls the gate in Lazybones and the manhole cover in 7th Heaven. These are often used to make kinetic displays. They also play on-going roles in the story and characterization.
The night watchman's office is one of many rooms in Borzage with glass walls. It recalls the inner office at the garage in Big City.
The store window with the stove is also a glass-walled area. We see both from outside and inside this window.
Borzage would later follow another illness among poor people in Europe, in Three Comrades.
No Greater Glory also recalls another film set in a lumber yard, Who Pays?: Toil and Tyranny (Harry Harvey, 1915). This starred future director Henry King, giving a charismatic performance. How likely is it, that there could be any influence of a 1915 film on a 1934 one? I'm not sure. Both films are somber, socially conscious dramas. Both also include a serious illness.
The lumber yard is notably geometric. We see both individual piles of wood, with regularly jutting boards, and also multiple piles of wood arranged in grids.
Does the hero's strong desire to conform and fit in with other guys, have any gay motivations? It is not clear.
The hero of Shipmates Forever fails to fit in with the other naval students. Unlike the boy in No Greater Glory, this does not bother him - although it upsets other people in the movie. Also, the hero of Flight Command fails to fit in with his new naval unit.
The glass-walled greenhouse in the botanical garden, also recalls the glass-walled cafe and dance halls in Sunrise. Borzage would go on to include the glass-walled garage in Big City.
The taxi-cab war recalls another metaphorical "war": that of the boys in No Greater Glory. (SPOILERS) Both wars have traitors; both have men who infiltrate the enemy's turf; both have observation posts (the room where Demarest watches the cab company); both have big fist-fight "battles".
I've seen reviews and plot synopses that describe Demarest and his crooks as "labor racketeers". This does not gibe at all with the actual plot of the film. Demarest and his thugs are hired by the manager of a big company, to serve as cab drivers in the firm. Their main mission, however, is to beat up the drivers and wreck the cabs of small, independent cabbies from other companies. Demarest is a thug, working for one company, to put its rivals out of business. He is NOT trying to infiltrate labor unions, or control union activities, or affect the treatment of labor in the big company or its rivals.
Racketeers like Demarest, were the frequent subject of exposes in MGM's film series Crime Does Not Pay. The crime plot aspects of Big City, can often seem like an large-scale episode of Crime Does Not Pay.
But it is also one of Borzage's portraits, of life in a group institution.
The heroine is almost shared by the members of the group. She is like the Commander's wife in Flight Command: someone who affects the life of everyone in the group.
Street Angel is an earlier Borzage film, about a woman hunted unjustly by the police.
The remote push-button of the device, is fairly sophisticated technology for its era.
The heroine is afflicted with a lazy father and brother, who she has to support. Soon she also has a dysfunctional husband, who she supports too.
The heroine's situation is complicated by the fact that her father, mother and husband are all liars. She often does not know the truth. By contrast, her brother, however lazy, sarcastic and obnoxiously cocky, is a truth-teller, and often shrewd in his insights. This gives the brother a certain redeeming quality.
While the heroine apparently tries to be a loyal wife to her new husband, he keeps throwing her into quasi-romantic situations with rich guy Spencer Tracy. The husband is nearly pimping her, trying to use the heroine's allure to get an in with Tracy. In consequence, it is almost as if the wife has married two men, not one. She seems to be a shared wife, between her legal husband and Tracy. This will echo other Borzage films, where a wife seems to be a First Lady or shared wife of a whole group of men. One thinks of the wife leading the Three Comrades, the heroine and all the taxi cab drivers in Big City, the Commander's wife in Flight Command who is a First Lady to all the men in the military unit.
The elevator at Tracy's has an elaborate light display, indicating the floors. This makes for a vivid on-screen light effect - and also plays a role in the plot. Borzage devices often serve such a dual kinetic / story development role.
The elevator also has a telephone. Like the burglar alarm in Man's Castle, it is a high tech communication device.
The three heroes of the film are inseparable. Although the heroine marries one of them, she is really given emotional support by all three. She is another Borzage heroine who is essentially the first lady of an institution: here the three comrades.
Three Comrades contains a number of Borzage's metaphorical "wars":
When the hero rushes across the sanitarium lobby, Borzage's camera follows him, and as he moves upstairs.
Even when men are not in uniform in Borzage, they are often dealing with large scale institutions: the labor unions and businesses in Stranded (1935) and Mannequin (1938), the university in The Mortal Storm. People do not live alone in Borzage: they deal with complex institutions and large groups of people to perform their jobs.
And not just men. Especially in his later films, women's lives and work often puts them at the center of institutions: the USO-run hall in Stage Door Canteen, the convent in Till We Meet Again, and Dolly Madison's role as First Lady of the White House in Magnificent Doll (1946). Here in Flight Command, Ruth Hussey has to serve as essentially First Lady of the flight squadron, having a similar quasi-official role as The Skipper's Wife. All of this work is seen as terribly demanding. It causes emotional stress, and also requires major organizational skills, as well as a form of "public living in the world" that is most unusual. Hussey's marriage is no longer a private affair. Both Hussey's husband, and his men, demand that the marriage be shared with the whole unit, and subject to their demands and manipulations. In more comic ways, the canteen has strict rules governing how the women can interact with men in Stage Door Canteen. More sinister again under the surface, but more comic in superficial tone, is the complex way the sisters have to court as a group in Seven Sweethearts, and the way their father interferes in their love life - not a pretty picture. The most intimate details of women's romantic lives become part of some group institution in Borzage.
Institutions in Borzage have infiltrators: outsiders who come in, and try to change it. One thinks of the racketeers who work their way into the labor union in Stranded. And the way the Nazi Party invades the classroom and family of the professor in The Mortal Storm. Both of these infiltrators are evil to the core. By contrast, the hero of Flight Command is placed in the uncomfortable position of being seen as an infiltrator of the squad, by all its members. He is imposed on them against their will by naval higher-ups at the start of the picture. And the suspicion never really stops - he is never genuinely accepted as a member of the unit. Despite all of this, he is not trying to subvert the organization, the way other infiltrators in Borzage sometimes do.
The commander of the squad explains that the squad runs on the devotion of the men to their leader, himself, and the return way in which the leader is devoted to his men. Borzage does not completely approve of, or idealize this arrangement. The commander's wife clearly feels the attention she is getting from her husband is inadequate. He instead seems mainly concerned that she behave in a way that boosts the morale of his men. She exists as a support for the more important relationship in his life.
The commander's second in command, "Dusty" Rhoades, is totally devoted to his leader. We see Dusty dating at one point, but not very intimately. It is clear that his main personal interest in life is his commander. He intervenes in a truly odd way towards the end of the film, to protect, as he sees it, his commander's marriage.
In History Is Made at Night, the chef nearly dies at the end, trying to be loyal to his friend. Here, Jerry actually does die, due to his reckless disregard of safety as a test pilot. In general, while the love of the chef is seen as a wholly positive thing in History Is Made at Night, in Flight Command the gay relationships seem more problematical. While Jerry is a largely admirable person as an inventor that tries to improve humanity's life, he is also 1) part of a war effort 2) not in touch with the life force that allows people to survive and flourish in Borzage.
In real-life, radar will actually be invented soon, so this film is talking accurately about the development of flight technology.
The invention work here recalls Stranded (1935). That film's hero is trying to build a thinly disguised version of the Golden Gate Bridge. Both films idealize men who work on large-scale, technology-oriented projects. However, the work on the bridge is a civilian effort, not a military one. And it is seen as wholly positive, creative and admirable by Borzage. While the fog-guidance invention here leads to its inventor's death. There are other differences, too. The engineer hero of Stranded is the leader of a large group of men, in a giant business enterprise of building the bridge. In this, he resembles Spencer Tracy's tycoon in Mannequin. Both men also share a hands-on, working man feel. By contrast, Jerry works in near complete isolation in Flight Command, with one assistant and the hero to help him. And he has an upper-middle class feel - he is definitely not a proletarian Man of the People.
The huge ship in History Is Made at Night is also a large scale technological object. And one which meets disaster, like many of the planes in Flight Command.
The naval squad in Flight Command has a truly terrible safety record! This is true of other movies about pilots, such as The Flying Fleet (George Roy Hill, 1929), Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939) and Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986), to name three films that seem the closest to Flight Command in approach - the first and last also being about elite US Naval aviators, who work in cutting-edge aviation in peace time, just as in Flight Command. Many of the men in Flight Command have nicknames, perhaps a precursor to the official flight-names the characters adopt in Top Gun. I have no idea if flying in real life is risky as these films make out, or whether it is exaggerated to pump up drama for the movies. All of these films, including Flight Command, have homoerotic subtexts.
Borzage had earlier made a film about a flyer whose compulsive recklessness ruined his life and marriage: Living on Velvet (1935). Both films depict danger as part of the emotional and psychological make-up of pilots. Both films have a deeply melancholy air.
Obviously Stage Door Canteen is atypical of Borzage's career, at least on the surface. Or is it? It has little to do with two of Borzage's principal themes, love and spirituality. But it has much to do with Borzage’s reverence for work. The theater people in the film are all great artists and craftsmen. They are the kind of people he admired in film after film, people whose work is creative and meaningful. A good deal of a film might show their actual work. They often make things or build things or do services useful to others. It is a side of Borzage that needs to be brought to the surface.
Have never forgotten the young soldier's awe at his meeting with Katherine Cornell, and their reciting of Romeo and Juliet together. This scene encapsulates all the love for the theater many people have. It is a force as great and as sublime as cinephilia. Only Borzage could express such an interior spiritual force with such clarity and power. (My other favorite film about the love of theater: The Great Garrick (James Whale, 1937)).
Have also seen a clip of an early Borzage talkie, Song O' My Heart (1930), with the great tenor John McCormack singing "Little Boy Blue". Such slow, delicately emotional numbers seem like a Borzage tradition. The tango "Adios Muchachos" in History Is Made at Night is also memorable.